A daytime festival is nice. But some travellers will want to travel by day and have some fun by night. The Festival du Voyageur will also accommodate you for this. While Fort Gibraltar is closing its doors at 9pm and you are kindly asked to leave, the rest of Voyageur Park gets livelier by then.
Also, for the photographers, the lighting gets more interesting, the place is full of coloured lights and this year’s choice is warm and cold.
The entry sculpture in the Park now looks like this:
Entry sculpture at Voyageur Park
An eerie glow of red and blue, with the absence of all other colours, now there’s a challenge for your camera!
The snow sculptures really look different now, in the night. Obviously you will need a tripod to catch them, but that was understood, no? So what about the others? Well, they look…. different.
Five moments by Italian sculptors
Now I don’t know if it is my eyes or if the camera had trouble focussing here, but this picture distinctively looks blurred. Well, it’s my eyes, really when looking at the original version (click the picture) you will see it’s tack sharp. So much for my judgement in sharpness. I guess, the fact that I’m wearing glasses may be part of it.
Of course, other sculptures look familiar to the ones we see in daylight.
Un givre en juillet (frosty in July)
La sculpture du Québec. For the French speaking visitors of my blog, please note the absence of an accent on the last letter of the title. The most interesting sculptures will take on a nice glow and against the sodium coloured background of the lights of Winnipeg it nearly seems to come alive. Perhaps that’s why they close the park before midnight…
Nearly alive?
But before you leave, you really want to go inside, warm up a bit, eat and drink something and listen to some music. If you are like us, you will take something warm to eat like stew or pea soup, both very good. And then the drinks… ok as long as you don’t take too many caribous you’ll be ok. During the day we found these remnants of better times:
Ice glasses with a hint of caribou
A caribou is a mix of red wine, sugar and whisky, probably also some spices. Really good to drink. Only if you take too many of them, your work the next day might look like this:
Too many caribous before work?
Of course, after the cold outside, the warmth inside and your drinks, you would like some nice, quiet music to relax. Well, no relaxation here. The gentlemen on stage here made sure of that. It could have been that we were sitting not far away from the loudspeakers (with the emphasis on loud) but the steady beat of their music made us want to leave perhaps a bit sooner than expected. The music was good, French (although that by itself is no guarantee for quality) and a good steady blues-type of music.
Dinner music
Or perhaps we simply came to eat at the wrong moment and the wrong place. Who knows. If we’d been sitting in the back I suppose we’d have appreciated the music better.
Anyway it’s a good thing to come and see the Festival du Voyageur in the evening, the environment and the atmosphere are quite different and pleasant. Definitely a must see for those who have the chance of living or staying in Winnipeg.